conservatism, again

The Chronicler takes another look at the direction of conservatism discussing EJ Dionne's article (my linking button is not working for some reason, sorry), which gives me a chance to come back to our earlier discussion on the subject. The Chronicler saw close up for fifteen years the healthy side of conservatism, and I agree that it was a strong pillar of thought. But after mulling it over for a while, what I think I was trying to get at is that the difficulty conservatism has faced, and will face, is that it is an intellectual movement on top of a base that does not value intellectualism. That was what I was trying to get at in our earlier exchange.

American conservatism will always face this internal contradiction. Like a birthday cake, an outer layer of conservative thought will always surround a much larger "conservative gut" that will always be essential for the movement's electoral success. These people have no idea who Kirk, or Buckley, or Strauss is. And they couldn't care less, although they share many of the same values and ideas. But the key point is that this conservative gut will go places that the conservative brain will not go, and have the numbers to carry the movement in that direction. This is why conservatism inevitably devolves to Bush and Palin. The urge to prevent change from happening, that visceral style of tribal politics that I identified as the core of conservatism eventually overwhelms a principled, thoughtful conservatism through sheer force of numbers.

So that is why when I hear the Andrew Sullivans and the Chroniclers of the world claim that "true" conservatism is being overrun, I am skeptical that they have ownership over what conservatism is when they are, alas, so outnumbered. And they always will be unless sales of Buckley start to rival Limbaugh's ratings.